Afterlives of Alexander

On February 11, Ioli Kalavrezou, the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Art at Harvard; Dimitris Kastritsis, a 2013–14 Byzantine Fellow and Lecturer at the University of St Andrews; and Jonathan Shea, Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Byzantine History, presented perspectives on the “Afterlives of Alexander in the Byzantine World” at the National Gallery of Art. Dumbarton Oaks cohosted the panel in conjunction with “Power and Pathos,” the special exhibition of Hellenistic bronze sculpture currently on display at the NGA. Kalavrezou highlighted the Byzantine use of images of Alexander as imperial symbols that could be appreciated by both Christian and non-Christian audiences. Kastritsis analyzed Ottoman annotations to the image captions of a manuscript of the Alexander romance to explore how non-Greek speakers may have reinterpreted the story of Alexander for their own purposes. Finally, Shea discussed the appropriation of Byzantine-style iconography on coins made by emirs of the Artuqid dynasty, who ruled in Eastern Anatolia, Northern Syria, and Northern Iraq during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Following the panel, Director of Byzantine Studies Michael Maas led a question and answer session.